From the Diaries of Pussy-Cake

The night it all went wrong.

I love Pamela. She is what I’ve been waiting for all my life. A chance to lower myself into complete abasement, a chance to beg for someone’s love over and over again, knowing I will never get it. After our first date, when I find out she has a boyfriend (or, as she explains, an ex-boyfriend who is not yet completely out of the picture), I sign off gallantly in an e-mail, “I am at your disposal.”

Except what I’ve written is “I am your disposal.”

I first meet Pamela Sanders (not her real name; not her name at all) in the late nineties, at a social-agency conference about the resettlement of Hmong refugees or something of the sort. She is a serious-minded Program Development Specialist who works at the nonprofit that just laid me off. I am now writing grant proposals for a Lower East Side settlement house. My title is Senior Grant Writer, but I am sometimes referred to as Señor Grant Writer, and people tell me I am not a team player.

She’s in her late twenties, a year or two older than I am, but already there are crow’s-feet radiating from the edges of her pale-gray eyes. But it’s not just her face. Her personality is old. She is a self-described urban hermit and an unreformed shoplifter. When I fall ill, she tells me she loves thinking of me as a feverish little nineteenth-century child with her playing the role of horny older caregiver. When she notices that I use Lever 2000 Pure Rain soap (forty-nine cents a bar at the local bodega), she tells me that it’s bad for my skin and gets me some fancy soap made from olive oil. She plays computer chess until two in the morning. She schedules a week off from work which she promises me will be “FuckFest ’99.” “I have this tingle in my middle region,” she informs me. She calls me Dope, Mr. Shygart, coy little mother, Poochie (as in “Have fun tonight, Poochie”), Pussy-cake, Big Furry Bitch.

She gets upset when I tell her I love her. She tells me that I’m quite “dear” to her, but she can’t reciprocate all this “love,” because of Kevin (not his real name), the not-quite-ex ex-boyfriend. “Oh, the complexities of modern life!” I write to her. “So many goofy, earnest middle-class boys to choose from.”

But here’s the real problem. Pamela and I both want to be writers, we both want to be card-carrying members of the East Coast intelligentsia, but we also both think we’re fakes. I’m a Russian immigrant (before the burst of Russian-immigrant lit of the early two-thousands), and she’s working class. To wit, she’s from a destroyed family in Washington State, her father a Boeing worker always worried about his next paycheck and the next union strike. Kevin’s family is her new family: tender, native-born, educated Jewish suburbanites. When she spends the weekend at their house, Kevin sleeps on the floor next to her bed, pretending that they’re still together in every way. Neither of them wants to give up the ruse to her adoptive parents.

And here’s what really hurts: I can’t give her the same kind of family. Not with the greenhorn Shteyngarts in their Little Neck enclosure. Not with my mother’s cold cabbage borscht with the surreally large dollop of sour cream, not with their Republican politics, not with their superannuated Ford Taurus leaking quietly in front of the single-car working-class garage.

“Don’t let that bastard Tolstoy ruin your life,” Pamela tells me.

Much like Pammy, I lead a double life. With her, I am a Big Furry Bitch. An optimistic, almost starry-eyed creature following her around from bookstore to morning-scone-and-coffee dispensary to foreign-film screening and back to bookstore, but always on guard against saying the wrong thing, always scared of asking for too much. With my friends, I am confident and full of life, proud that I have a girlfriend for the first time in years (most of my friends don’t know about Kevin), proud to have rejoined the world of the reproductive.

When Pamela doesn’t want to see me, I retreat into food and cocktails, to the point where Pamela complains that all I ever talk about is the overpriced crap I put into my mouth. My nonprofit salary goes entirely toward gin fizzes at Barramundi on Ludlow, hookah pipes at Kush on Orchard, oysters at Pisces on Avenue A, yam and roast duck at Le Tableau on Fifth Street. Post-gorging, my friends and I head back to the tiny studio I rent on Delancey Street to hear MC Solaar drop French-Senegalese beats on my new TEAC stereo and sing along to “Prose Combat” and “Nouveau Western.” A typical e-mail to Pam at the time: “We had tapas at Xunta that were nonpareil, dry sausage, blood sausage, olives stuffed with anchovies, sheep’s-milk cheese, patatas bravas, and the ubiquitous garlic shrimp.” Oh, that nonpareil dry sausage. Oh, those ubiquitous garlic shrimp.

So here I am boasting of my gastronomy with friends to Pam, and of my lovemaking with Pam to my friends. And there I am in bed in my Lower East Side studio, my futon gently sliding down the sloped floor until I crash headlong into my bookshelf, crying furry Poochie tears, because Pam is with Kevin in New Jersey or, worse yet, with Kevin in her Boerum Hill apartment, having her famous lamb and oven-roasted potatoes like the married couple they should have been.

“If you won’t speak to me, it is better not to live!” is what I shouted to my mother when she gave me the silent treatment as a child. Alone and crying and plotting angry revenge: this is what it feels like to be home. This is comfortable and familiar.

Desperate, I write to Pam, “I would love it if Kevin and I could be friends and we could all spend time together.”

Even more desperate: “Perhaps we can even form a kind of unconventional family, Marin County style.”

My perception of Marin County, California, appears to have been flawed at the time.

Finally, I take it to the next level. I am not supposed to be anywhere near her apartment when Kevin deigns to visit from New Jersey, but one such night I find myself at the nearby Brooklyn Inn, a dusty but attractive bar on Hoyt Street with huge arched windows and a long dark-wood bar. Kevin and Pammy both love the place, because it attracts a certain well-groomed literary crowd, the people they one day wish to be. At the bar, I guzzle down a vodka tonic, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another and another.

The walk from the Brooklyn Inn to Pamela’s apartment takes about five minutes under sober conditions. The main danger for me now is Atlantic Avenue, which has many lanes to cross, more than two for certain. A small Japanese car pulling out into traffic bumps me somewhere around the hip, but I shrug it off, waving at the driver not to worry. Eventually, I turn onto leafy, gorgeous State Street, Pam’s street, and crawl on all fours up to her buzzer. At the top step, I collapse and take a little breather, gather my anger together. The last time I hit somebody was when I was twelve, a kid who was scrawny, malnourished, Belorussian, and even weaker than me. I would torture him while citing the torture scene from Orwell’s “1984.” “Power is not a means, Vinston,” I would say, with a trace of my disappearing Russian accent, “it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

What I am about to hit now is not exactly Kevin. It is not even Orwell’s poor Vinston. It is a door. Pamela’s front door.

The problem with chronicling the lowest moment of my life is that I can’t recall much of it.

Here’s what I do remember. I am hitting the door. The tough Brooklyn door, probably wrought in the time of Walt Whitman, does not budge. Instead, my hand turns red, then purple. I feel nothing. Maybe my hip is starting to ache some from being hit by the car on Atlantic. Then I am inside, because someone (Pam?) has opened the door, and I am racing upstairs to confront my nemesis.

The thing about Kevin is that he truly is very handsome. He has a real jaw, a serious nose, and tight clever eyes beneath a well-stocked brow. Immediately, I can tell that I am outclassed.

What happens in the next few seconds, minutes, or hours seems to be this: I scream and cry, something like “I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it anymore! It is better not to live!,” and Pammy screams and cries with me. Kevin, as far as I can remember, remains fairly immobile and unmoved. He says a few things here and there, perhaps along the lines of, I’m sorry it has to be like this. But what’s truly amazing about this scene is that Pamela and I are essentially putting on a performance for Kevin. The two outsiders, one drunk out of his mind, the other depressed and eternally abandoned, are dancing and singing and weeping for Kevin, our God.

Pamela guides me downstairs, my hand now throbbing to the point where my eyes are clouded in a different brand of tears. She goes no further than the door on which I released twenty-seven years of frustration, a door that she slams shut behind me. Angry, accusatory e-mails will stream in from her by morning’s light. It would appear that by meeting Kevin I have broken the rules of the game.

Around this time, at the behest of a concerned friend, I start seeing a psychoanalyst four days a week. In his own silent way, my analyst counsels against the dating of Pamela Sanderses and the drunken assault of sturdy Brooklyn doors. Once I begin to leave her, she wants me back. Her e-mails become more plaintive. New Year’s Eve, 2000, is coming up, and she has not been invited to any parties. “What are you doing around New Year’s? Parties?” she asks me with a new shyness. I tell her that I have plans, typing the words reluctantly, because I know what it’s like to be lonely on a significant date and because I still love her. After that, we lose touch.

Three years later, Pamela Sanders is in a creative-writing M.F.A. program at the University of Florida. One night, she sees her latest ex-boyfriend—a Ph.D. student in English, who, rumor has it, has done something terrible to her—sitting on the patio of the Market Street Pub & Brewery. When he gets up, Pamela follows him through the bar and into the restroom. She is carrying a carpenter’s hammer, its head wrapped in plastic. In the restroom, as he is taking a leak, Pamela hits the back of his head repeatedly with the claw end of the hammer. “I’m going to kill you!” Pamela is screaming, according to the arrest form. “You ruined my life!” He wrestles the hammer from her in the bathroom, and she runs out of the Market Street Pub, leaving her victim to stagger back into the bar. He suffers multiple lacerations and contusions to the head.

Pamela flees the state of Florida; she is charged with attempted murder. Eventually, she returns to Florida and turns herself in. The charges are reduced to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and she is sentenced to a year in the county pen.

The first time I hear of the crime it is 2004, and I am at a writers’ conference in Prague, following the publication of my first novel. My beer-hoisting interlocutor tells me the tale with a smile, which may indicate that he knows of our past relationship. I can only imagine how quickly and gleefully a story like this must have spread through a college town. How quickly the term Pamma Hamma Slamma would be coined. Even before the attack, she was a mystery to many of her fellow-writers and teachers, but several of the women in the creative-writing program rallied behind her, one apparently going as far as to take her into her home, in Gainesville, after she was released on fourteen years’ probation. Some time later, she returned to New York City.

“That guy whose head she bashed in,” my drinking companion in Prague tells me, “he kind of looked like you! He had a beard!”

I am later told that Pam’s fiction was really coming into its own before the attack, something that does not surprise me, because she was always an exceptionally strong writer, if maybe a little too scared of the truth she was leaving behind on the page. But that kind of work requires a bravery different from the kind needed to bash a human being over the head with the claw end of a carpenter’s tool in a stinking subtropical bathroom, again and again and again. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.